


He Called It a Freedom

by Deepdarkwaters



Category: Velvet Goldmine
Genre: Gen, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-12-22
Updated: 2013-12-22
Packaged: 2018-01-05 14:51:23
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,670
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1095280
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Deepdarkwaters/pseuds/Deepdarkwaters
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Arthur meets Curt for the first time in a decade and everything changes.</p>
            </blockquote>





	He Called It a Freedom

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Rodo](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Rodo/gifts).



  
_"He called it a freedom. A freedom you can allow yourself – or not."_  
~Velvet Goldmine

* * *

There's barely anything in Arthur's flat. The year, the place, the job, the age he is – until this week and the memories it dredged up, it just seemed normal to be living with the dull depressing blank white walls and shabby bits of old furniture that were there when he moved in. Now he remembers his old rooms in Manchester and London, the pages carefully pulled from magazines and sellotaped to every flat surface and the rainbow scatter of t-shirts and scarves and badges and record sleeves, and thinks it again: _I'm two people. I was one person, now I'm someone else._ So he sits at the desk at the side of his boring room and rolls a sheet of paper the same colour as the boring walls into his typewriter, intending to work the revelation into Lou's Tommy Stone article somehow – _we're all Brian Slade, even me. Even Curt_ – but the words won't come.

Instead he finds himself wondering what that boy would think of the man he's become, that terrified awkward boy who blushed at everything and could never look right no matter how enormous his effort and intent. Things should be so easy now. He's about as low as you can get in the hierarchy of journalism but it's still several million miles higher than the kid who used to sit there bitter and aching in a brown suburban living room, trying to stamp out the dangerous little fires of rebellion blazing in his head: _Get up. Say it. Point at that absurd incredible peacock on the telly and tell those drab people who gave you life that they created a monster just like it._ Even now he's got a voice, he can't work out how to use it.

He can still smell the beer he spat up into his hand, it's still damp on his cuff. Curt's pin – Oscar Wilde's pin, he said – is in his inside pocket, and as soon as he remembers it then it's in his hand, emerald green and cold to the touch.

He'd wondered for a while whether that night after Jack Fairy's Death of Glitter show had actually happened, wondered if it was some hallucination or daydream he had while he was high, or maybe it had happened but not with Curt and his mind had filled in a different face, accent, chipped nail paint, everything. Now, with the pin in his palm, the memories are startling like a film with too much colour: the golden flecks of stubble, coal-crumbs of dark makeup caught in the corner of vivid blue eyes, bruiselike veins in a translucent wrist and the dirty terracotta brick dust that ground itself into the red grazes on his palms. In softer light than this he can still see the faint white patch of a scar on the heel of his left hand where his sweating flesh slipped on the edge of the wall he was leaning against.

The overhead lights are harsh, turning the night outside the uncovered windows to a deep and featureless black with only a distant muffled siren to show there's a world out there at all. Arthur turns his back on it and sits at his desk with a yellow notepad and biro, thoughts suddenly coming quicker than he can type until his hand turns red and tender with the pressure of the memories spilling out through his pen: he remembers the instant Curt first saw him after the concert, the look he'd had in his eyes, the prowling way he'd walked towards him later and the lingering, heated glance as he'd disappeared though a door, and he remembers pinpricks of light in the sky and the way one of them fell and disappeared – he remembers thinking then about how wishes on falling stars never came true before but maybe tonight they would, maybe just this once they would, but he couldn't formulate a wish with words in time, not even in his head, so he let the sensation of soaring and the butterflies in his stomach do it for him instead: some abstract wordless wish that the world would stop spinning and stay this way forever, an eternal night of a billion stars and thundering music and lips ghosting soft sounds against his neck.

And somewhere the article starts to take shape without Arthur really noticing he's changed direction until he's two pages into it. He hesitates then and takes the time to stretch out his aching hand, digging the fingertips of the other – the faintly scarred one – into the seizing muscles of his palm. It's a voice in his head that spurs him back to work, an American voice with brimming laughter disguised behind words as serious and urgent as as a plea: _Make a wish_.

"And see yourself on stage," Arthur murmurs to himself, doodling circles in the margin that almost look like spaceships. He begins writing again, a cascade of words filling page after page of the notepad, and by the time the first anaemic tinge of dawn begins to show in the corner of the window he's done, he's got it: a memoir of sorts, a history, a pop culture critique, a revelation about the world's biggest star that could either shatter him apart or make him soar. All it needs now is a title, and he tries to excavate one up from his exhausted brain: some kind of clever pun, something about pinning hopes on people, pinning up posters, pin drop silence...

Because it's the pin at the heart of it all.

This pin Arthur's now holding in his hand, an emerald monkey's paw, was there with Oscar Wilde and Brian Slade and Curt Wild and who knows how many other owners, all of them blasted to the height of the stars and then dropped into the gutter. It's an invisible golden thread through history, like a malevolent finger toppling a row of shining dominoes across the boundaries of time.

He's never been superstitious or believed in much of anything, but here and now – here in the middle of a city that doesn't yet feel like home, now he's written the first thing in his life that he can imagine being published somewhere other than the pages of a trashy newspaper that nobody reads – he feels breathless with ambition, like the whole world's opened up and held its hand out to invite him in.

 _It's a freedom_ , Curt said that night. _A freedom you can allow yourself – or not._

Arthur tucks the pin back into his pocket with the crumpled slip of paper holding Curt's scrawled phone number, and finally makes his choice.

***

The first dozen times Arthur turns the corner in the bar, the table at the end there is empty or cluttered with strangers - then one day he checks again and his breath catches for a moment like there's barbed wire in his throat. Curt looks up at him sideways, irritable, glowing cigarette clinging to the corner of his lips and newspaper folded in half in front of him and stained with damp beer bottle circles that make the ink bleed through from the pages below.

"Guess I shouldn't have said that about changing the world." He draws long on his cigarette then stubs it out on the table, smoke pluming from his nose in a sigh that's weary and exasperated and resigned all at once. "You'll probably win a... fucking Pulitzer or something."

"Can I sit down?"

"Don't start asking permission to invade my privacy _now_."

Whatever's in the air between them is almost suffocating. When Arthur sits he can see his own byline photo upside-down, grains of black and white, a faint smile insinuating that there are still plenty of secrets held close to his chest ready to reveal when the time is right, even though the only ones he's got are too immense and personal to be written anywhere but that stack of curling papers he's folded and sealed into an envelope in his desk drawer. "I was thinking about that, actually. What you said about change."

"No shit." Curt gestures disgustedly at the newspaper with the new unlit cigarette he's got in his mouth, and Arthur leans over to give him a light. It's the first time he can bring himself to look at Curt's eyes, but there's no real anger there - just a wary, grudging sort of interest. "Look, man, if you've got nothing to say maybe you could just fuck off back to Leeds or wherever the fuck it is you came from-" Arthur cuts him off with a laugh he can't help and didn't expect, startlingly loud in the painful quiet of the empty bar, making Curt narrow his eyes and then, amazingly, break out a quiet bemused little laugh of his own. "What?"

"Manchester."

"What's the difference?"

There are countless things Arthur wants to say to him, huge things that he didn't have the insight or courage to articulate ten years ago, things so huge that even now it seems impossible to constrain them with mere words - _you did change the world, you and Brian, you changed it forever, you changed my world and for that one shining fleeting little bit of time in my whole life I loved the world completely without question or confusion_ \- but not now, not here in a rotting little dive bar.

"Do you want it back?" Arthur says instead, suddenly afraid that if he doesn't say something now then he won't at all. "The pin, I mean."

He finds it in his pocket and holds it out, but Curt just looks at it for a moment as if he's never seen it before, then up at Arthur through the haze of smoke between them. "No. I don't want anything from you, man."

"Not even a beer?"

And just there, a glimmer of a smile that finally reaches Curt's eyes although it barely touches his mouth.


End file.
